A powerful, unflinching examination of the psychological wages of war.
A seriously wounded soldier wrestles with the trauma and guilt that haunt him in this novel.
Sgt. Charley Cooper is a battle-hardened Marine whose life—and mind—is suddenly shattered by an IED while stationed in Afghanistan. He suffers from extraordinary burns—his body is considerably scarred from the incident, leaving him noticeably disfigured. Even worse, he’s afflicted by a debilitating amnesia, remembering very little of his wartime experiences (“He tried to see the face of his Company Commander, or Gunny Morrison but they would not materialize. He knew he should be able to see his platoon leader’s face, but the likable young, 2nd Lieutenant was gone”). This makes it nearly impossible to overcome the post-traumatic stress disorder that originates in horror he cannot confront. His wife, Annie, struggles to comfort him, but Charley withdraws into his own solipsistic paralysis, finding solace in lonely inactivity. But as the distance between them grows, and financial distress creeps in, Annie threatens to leave Charley if he can’t find a path to recovery. Charley calls his Uncle David, hoping to score some free firewood in advance of a cold Maine winter, and David comes to visit to help him log the territory. Eventually, David and Charley start a logging business together, and that purposeful labor and an experimental medical procedure help Charley chart the course back to both remembrance and self-forgiveness. Linden (The Content of Character, 2011, etc.) masterfully contrasts the defensive inwardness of both David and Charley; David has Asperger’s syndrome, and he, too, frequently retreats into the inner recesses of his mind to hide from life’s major and minor stresses. This dysfunction equips him, though, to deeply understand Charley’s tendencies, and he often remarks upon this with a bracing candor that many would not voice. David confronts challenges of his own, and the book provides flashbacks to the time he spent logging the property with his Uncle Bjorn, which helps him to assist Charley. The author’s prose, spare and direct, potently conveys the emotional angst of men not naturally predisposed to introspection. While the subject matter lends itself to a cloying sentimentality or a neat and uplifting denouement, Linden exercises admirable restraint in avoiding both. This brief work poignantly expresses the havoc combat wreaks on even the hardiest warriors.
A powerful, unflinching examination of the psychological wages of war.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5089-5211-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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